Sixfoot6.com - Putting Stuff Away.

Lately every song seems to hang on my heart with twice the usual amount of nostalgia. Favorite tunes hearken back to favorite places with too much emotional clarity, too much distraction for the regular workday. Pop songs I never liked in the first place now make me long for proms I never attended in high schools that don't exist, during eras that don't even map to my own adolescence. Albums I first gestated in the late 90s now seem impossible to divorce from their original timescapes; Odelay, Bossanova, Hello Nasty, and TNT in particular have more interest in memory than music.

Maybe all of this modern grownuppedness (marriage, proper job, multi-responsibilities, travel, settling down far from home) has up-kodakchromed those lazy days of college summers: chicken on the grill, croquet on the lawn, smoke on the patio, the guys in the pond. No plans, just one day at a time. Those were always the glory days, but now the music cheats, presenting them as some kind of high water mark, no longer accessible.

So the counter-attack is clear: do whatever it takes to fill every new night, weekend and vacation with the joy of those days, and then some. The music itself doesn't know any better.

As usual the first day of the conference was a whirlwind of hugs and drinks. Already, Twitter is turning out to be a huge novel organizing / humor force. Funny how tech innovations so quickly grab hold and affect the behavior of geeks. And last night I bumped into a few friends I didn't expect to see, so things are off to a good start.

Personal goals and guidelines for this year:

1. Take notes during panels, only as necessary. At the end of each day, distill each panel down to a 3 sentence lesson that I can post here and refer to later for inspiration and action.
2. When notes aren't necessary, close the damn laptop and look the speakers in the eye.
3. Note the podcast URLs of great panels I couldn't get to.
4. When it comes to lunch and bar outings, stop trying to please everybody all of the time. If the administration overhead gets rough, bail.
5. Find a small goup of people during nighttime activities, just like the old days. As Break Bread With Brad taught us on Friday night, there's not much rewarding about giant parties. And they're only going to get bigger.
6. Get to know 3 new people every day. Have an in-depth conversation with one of them
7. Introduce myself to anyone who's standing around alone. Everyone likes to talk, but none of these indoor geeks know where to start.
8. Drink less, get up early, take advantage of the free Residence Inn buffet breakfast daily.

We'll see how many of these are possible. I can't believe how many people are hear this yeaar. It's like a festival rock show.

Here I sit in the Phoenix airport, enroute to Austin for my 7th SXSW. Then next week it's onward to Boston... then to Amsterdam for Fatty's bachelor party (dear lord), then back to Boston for a few days... then home to Santa Barbara at the end of the month. Another trip in a year of much travel.

Jenny and I have had a fantastic & busy couple of months in SB, with her new job as a producer/editor for the local ABC station; lots of cool design projects for me, a visit to NYC to meet the whole PlusThree team, not to mention the birth of my new niece Danika last weekend. Plenty of babysitting in store.

I managed to sleep a bit last night, and I'm excited to see my geek friends, to play with legos and to relax, learn and socialize. Keep tabs on me via Flickr and Twitter (see the updated "Stuff I'm doing block on the front page of this site), and I'll try to post here regularly during the trip. Time to start writing more, eh?